A Guide to Gamified Reading Experiences

Interactive fiction is basically a branching narrative. There are many decision points throughout the story where the reader can make a choice. Each choice will branch off into its own story path, and no two story paths are the same.

It's like a fork in the road, your experience will be different depending if you go left or right.

There are different types of branching narrative structures. If you are familiar with Choose Your Own Adventure books, you would have experienced the following structure, called the Gauntlet.

Storylets: You Want Them

In this structure, there is one main narrative, and depending on the choices made, some endings occur earlier than others. The Gauntlet represents this type of branching very well.

Another type of branching narrative structure is the Branch and Bottleneck. The story will branch out to different story paths, but merge back together again before branching out once more.

Storylets: You Want Them

In this type of structure, merging all the branches together is usually done to experience the same story event in the main narrative. 

For example, the protagonist is travelling from her small town to the capital to seek employment. The story will branch out depending on how she decides to travel to the capital: by cart on the main road, by foot through the forest, or by boat along the river. The reader will experience a different story depending on the mode of transport chosen. However, once the protagonist reaches the capital, the three story paths merge back together to continue the main narrative.

Another type of branching narrative structure is the Time Cave. This one is a classic, and it is also the one that you are creating with ChatGPT in Part 5 of this Guide.

Now, let's learn how to use Twine to get started on creating your own interactive fiction!

When you open Twine, you will need to create a new story by selecting [➕ New ] in the menu. Give your story a name and select OK!

You should now see the following on your screen after naming your story.

The green rocket indicates the starting point of your story. The square attached to the rocket is called a Passage. You write your story inside passages, and when you are ready to branch out the story, you create a new passage.

Select the passage by double-clicking. You should have a new window that popped up.

The new window looks like a text editor, right? This is where you can write you story. But first, let's rename the passage from Untitled Passage to Start.

To rename the passage, select [ ✏️ Rename ]. Type in Start and then select OK.

Now, let's write some text in this passage. How about trying the following?

Make sure that when you type the choices they are between two square brackets: [[ I am a choice ]]

Did you notice that new passages were created after you typed [[Choice 1]] and [[Choice 2]]?

This is the easiest way to create new passages when branching your story. The other way is to select [➕ New ] in the menu. 

Now, what happens if you don't want your new passages to be called 'Choice 1' and 'Choice 2'?

You can use arrows, like ->, to show what you want the new passage to be named. For example, I want the passage for Choice 1 to be named '1A', so I type [[Choice 1->1A]]. This can be translated to: Choice 1 is called 1A.

Ok, now delete one of the choices.

Did you notice that the passage is still there, but it is no longer linked to the Start passage? Some people call these orphan passages when they are not linked to another passage.

But, don't worry! You can always link passages back together again. You just need to retype the choice inside two square brackets.

There you go!